I ran my first one-shot in TinyD6 and it was Amazing

Back in late December, I joined some old friends in a regular D&D campaign. It’s been a really good time. The group is great, and the DM is really creative. I’ve been having a blast learning all the intricacies and quirks of D&D 5e.

After getting a handle on that character and creating a couple of other characters for fun, I got the inspiration for a one shot. It was a couple of cool ideas from a pulp SciFi book I enjoyed as a kid. Around the same time, I learned about about the TinyD6 System.

It seemed perfect for my tastes, a minimalist rpg system sounded really easy to put together. On a whim I bought the Tiny Frontiers book and poked around. I fleshed out some areas and a general story, and that was that.

A few weeks later, lo and behold, our regular DM couldn’t make it. I announced my one shot, and 3 people said yes!

They showed up at 6:30. By 7:30 they had made characters and we had talked over the rules. They made a nerd, himbo, and badass characters. Over the next 3 hours we ran a good RP encounter, a bunch of exploring and stealth, and 2 full combat encounters. Which coming from D&D was wild! We often end up alternating between RP sessions and epic combat sessions, but this was an entirely different kind of fun.

After the session, one of the players said Tiny D6 is like catnip to a D&D player. Being able to just pick 4 traits off of a list of 50 and go let them use character ideas that they otherwise wouldn’t have made for a full campaign. Plus it helped that a satisfying 6-8 round combat encounter could be done in a half hour.

As a GM, it was nice that I felt I had a full understanding of the minimalist rules. It felt good to improvise a contested-strength based grapple system on the spot because a player wanted to move an enemy. Also it was really nice to not have to think about modifiers. I struggle with mental math so just being able to pick the number of dice and read the rolls was awesome.

Going forward, I’m totally going to make a Tiny One Shot folder that I can have handy. With about 20 sheets of paper I’ll be set up to run a one shot whenever. I could make enemies while the players make their characters.

So if you have $20, 3 friends, a Saturday for your first time prep, and 4 hours to play, I 100% recommend Tiny D6.